We all remember from the Karma days how unreliable user-reported disk problem anecdotes can be. The head unload issue is reported by smartctl and so is almost certainly real: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=51401 although, equally, the variability of the anecdotes on that thread makes it sound as if some people don't get affected; perhaps it's improved in later firmware versions.

Peter

Really recent Linux distro's already "quirk" those drives by disabling APM (Advanced Power Management) on them using hdparm.

The best solution apparently is the wdidle3 MS-DOS utility from WD, with which the "Timer can be set from 100 ms to 25.5 seconds, in 100ms increments", as well as disabled completely.

-ml

Heh. Not questioning; I just wanted more data.

Modest confusion on my part: "EcoGreen" is the Samsung term. "Green Power" is the Western Digital term. The Amazon deal I posted was for the Western Digital drive.

If you follow the links from Peter, you'll find that most of the discussion is of the WD10EACS and earlier versions. Amazon is selling the WD10EADS. ("D", not "C", the key difference being a doubling of the cache size.) If you poke deeper into the SilentPCReview thread, the consensus seems to be that, on these later drives, the utility that lets you adjust the idle timer is no longer supported and using it will void your warranty. Also, those people are convinced that this drive is still parking the head every eight seconds but the SMART counter isn't incrementing.

Very disturbing.

So, dearest mlord, I need to buy some 1TB drives to hold my music and pictures. What brand/model do you recommend?

Heh.. no good choices, are there!

Definitely NOT Seagate. Doesn't WD have a non GreenPower version?

The Hitachi drives are also big, and very quick (noticeably faster than the other two). But I did have one of those die prematurely here last fall..

Gotta love industry consolidation.

-ml

If you go to NewEgg and ask for a 1TB internal SATA drive, you get ten choices:

- four WD models, priced from $99 to $209.
- four Seagate models, priced from $89 to $159.
- one Hitachi, $87.
- one Samsung, $99.

If you ask for 1.5TB, you get two choices: a Seagate and a WD. If you ask for 2TB, you get one choice: a WD. That's it. Here's the full list (assuming the link works).

Given that list, what's the least likely to go kaboom?

What about Samsung ?

I'm happy with my 2 1Tb samsungs so far. Very fast, pretty quiet, no deaths yet.

Unfortunately personal anecdotes over the reliability of drives aren't really useful, they are just a single data point. I was more after any known documented issues that Mark might have come across.

data points?

I bought 9 drives and had ~17 failures with the HD103UJ 1Tb Samsungs over a few months.

Eventually Samsung replaced all 9 with Enterprise edition ones. They fail far less regularly - only ~5 so far...

If I had to purchase my own 3.5" drives right now, I'd look for WD drives without the "GreenPower" thingie.

For notebooks, WD is also my top choice for a mechanical drive.

But I'm expecting delivery later this week of an OCZ Vertex for my main notebook. Hard to beat a good SSD when huge capacity isn't needed.

Cheers

Okay, then. Amazon is selling the WD "Caviar Black" 1TB disks for $105.98. I've ordered two of those. I don't actually care about speed so much as noise and power consumption (and not gratuitously blowing up, of course). From a pretty detailed review, here are some noise numbers:



The Caviar Black that I'm getting is 3.6dB louder than the Caviar Green. That's non-trivial, but tolerable (we'll have to see how good a job the case does of muffling it). But then there's power consumption:



Since most of the time the computer isn't actually doing much with the disks, but it's otherwise on, the idle power numbers are the ones that really matter to me. The power differences are quite surprising: an extra 2.7 watts for what's presumably very similar hardware. None of this is in "break the bank" territory. It's just unfortunate that I have to take a noise and power penalty just to have a drive that might actually last a few years without going belly-up on me.

My server's in the spare room, so the noise penalty means more to me. I figure that I'll be upgrading the disk well before the few years is up (I double my storage capacity about every 2-3 years). With regular backups (which, admittedly, I'm still struggling a bit with), I'm not that fussed about dead disks. If I was worried about uptime and high availability, my priorities would be different, but going without my server for a couple of days is do-able.

Weird, I guess the Velociraptor consumes so little energy because it's a 2.5" drive?

I have the 300GB version, and even though the velociraptor places highest on that noise chart, it hasn't bothered me.

By the way, the 1TB Green Power WD drive is on sale today at Newegg for $89

Of course, when we're talking about disk noise, we had an old Fujitsu Eagle (470MB !) in the CS undergrad association office when I was a student. That thing was unbearably loud, and Wikipedia claims it drew 600 watts.

Sometimes it helps to put things in perspective.

My master plan to solve this issue:

I presently have my data stored on a LaCie 2x750GB Firewire external drive. I have a second one that I use as a Time Machine backup.

The new hard drives, striped together and running inside my new Mac Pro, will be my primary storage. One of the Firewire boxes will be the Time Machine backup. The other Firewire box will be moving to my office and connected to my work machine, and I'll set up rsync, giving me offsite, networked backups. I figure that, by doing the initial dump while it's still at home, the incrementals shouldn't completely destroy my DSL line.

After Apple releases OS X 10.6, I hope to rearrange the Mac's internal drives to use ZFS. At that point, I can retire the Time Machine drive.

Interestingly, I'm still actually actively using a 202MB WD AC2200F hard drive that was the first hard drive I ever purchased, back in about 1992-3. It's obviously not got much capacity, and it's not speedy, but it's never thrown any errors and it still works just fine.

Considering it is only a $5 discount, they've got a huuuuge advert for that drive

Yeah, that's pretty much how all the bacon I get from them in my inbox looks like. I'd unsubscribe, but occasionally there really is a great deal, or I'll see a deal for someone I know. It's quite helpful.

These are now down to $99.99 with free shipping. How did these work out for you?

My computer locked up during backups last night because of lack of disk space, so I guess it is time to upgrade. I am far from a hardware guru, so it is with some trepidation that I consider this.

I think the two drives that I want to replace are SATA drives, but I don't know how to tell for sure. Device Manager says they are: "MAXTOR S TM3320620AS SCSI Disk Device". I know for a certainty that they are not SCSI drives, but how can I tell if they are SATA?

Assuming they are SATA drives, is it then just a matter of removing the old drives, plugging in the data and power cables to the new drives and copying the data from my backups? (The replacement drives will be for my D: data storage drive and E: backup drive. My C: system drive is a separate small IDE drive.)

In the meantime I have gone through and cleaned up my existing drives so that hopefully I can re-run my backups tonight and not have them crash for lack of space.

tanstaafl.

Just plunk STM3302620AS into google:

Maxtor DiamondMax 21 320GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB NCQ Hard Drive

SATA controllers can/do appear in Windows as SCSI controllers for some reason. If you're certain that its not SCSI then it'll be SATA. Mark has confirmed it anyway.


Pretty much.

Quite well. These turn out to be precisely the disks that Apple sells you when you order a new Mac Pro with a 1TB internal drive. So far, they're working without complaint.

Dragging up an oldish post.

Is WD still the disk of choice for 3.5" drives? What's so bad about the WD GreenPower drives?

Stig

The greenpower drives spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down ... perhaps a hundred times a day.

Which means they'll hit their design lifespan within a couple of years or less.

That's not good for data safety.

Thanks, Mark. Is there a way to disable that feature? As the GreenPower drives are cheaper than Caviar Black. Or is Caviar Black a better drive overall? I plan to use them as drives in a NAS.

Stig

Do they spin down even if the host isn't telling it to do so?

Apparently they did in early firmware versions. I've just checked mine, though, and it's had 270 spin-up cycles in 2500 power-on hours, which sounds about right (two or three a day) for the ones initiated by the OS ("hdparm -S 242 /dev/sda").

Peter

I did wonder, I have Samsung EcoGreens in my ReadyNAS and looking at the SMART data and it only shows 7 power cycles and over 3000 operating hours which makes me think they've been spinning pretty much constantly since I bought them.